this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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I always wonder how much of Lemmy is just bots. Am I blissfully alone interacting with the machine? Or are you weirdos actually real?
What a wonderful question!
You are right in doubting the identity of users using Lemmy. But I can assure you, not only am I human -- I am real as well!
I am absolutely human. Now, real? I'm not too sure about that.
It has such a humanistic approach
Missed the opportunity for an emdash there
I feel like the incentive for corpo/astroturf/spam bots is not really there to visit fediverse. So let us remain unpopular !
I agree with this take. We’re not gonna be worth the bandwidth over here. Facebook can generate millions of impressions.
I'm real, but how could you "really" know?
There’s only one way : Pics or didn’t happen
Well, the number of fingers seems to be ok
It's impossible to tell the dumbest human and the smartest bot apart, because anything one bleets out with no thought or intelligence to ground it against an underlying reality... Could also have been bleeted out with no thought or intelligence to ground it against an underlying reality by the other.
Unless they use en dash when it "should" be used according to the grammar books, apparently.
It's not about intelligence, it's about patterns. The bigger LLMs can already mimic the smartest individuals fairly well.
And other signs of AI writing, at least for now. They may move away from that in time as people catch on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Signs of AI Writing - just grab a book on corporate way of speaking/writing e-mails and you will find it exactly the same.
Actually, they don't mean that bots are making content on the internet or interacting with anyone. They mean it is agentic AI doing internet searches etc.
Just botting it up over here. Sorry dawg, blessings to your skin.
I find ~~arguments~~ interactions on lemmy go much more in-depth and feel dramatically more authentic than the responses to arguments i used to get on reddit. -That said i'm pretty sure c/political memes@lemmy.world is primarily bots. I'm also sure there are a few similar communities that are just as bad, but they appear limited.
Lemmy has a small userbase that has a high percent of humans vs bots, but a lot of those people tend to be whackos. Reddit has a huge user base with way more bots and whakcos (both by percentage and raw numbers), but also more normal humans. So there's a tradeoff there in which platform you use I suppose.
ID age verification is a good example of something that could actually do a lot to reduce spam and ensure people are talking to real people, but it would never happen because the money is in flagging and tracking the verified people and selling access to the bots talking to them.
What happens in 18 years when the bots are all grown up?
They get put out to pasture, selling WoW gold to each other until their server goes down.
I’m a real boy!!!
Prove it
I dig holes for a living and I can’t afford health care.
How long is your nose?
There are some bots that behave like some Tracies straight from myspace, I don't know why they're doing this, they are just paraphrasing the memes they comment
I'm not joking
I am human. My insides are soft and warm. Nary a nut or bolt to scrape you raw.
E_PLAYHUMAN
I am not a bot.